Natural Gardening

Here is my presentation from the Sustainability Festival on
the 20th ..... Something I forgot to say and would like to add. When
you first start out not mowing and you aren't used to it, it's going to
look a bit like the beginning phase of a beard. Rough and scraggly,
just hold on. It's going to be a colorful ride.

Picture
in your mind the Garden of Eden - a
paradise.

I
imagine an ancient place dripping
with fruit and nuts, food at my finger tips and I don’t imagine a place where people
are slaving away. It’s what we dream of,
but gardening the common way is so labor
intensive and expensive. Much of
the time and effort is spent adjusting for our poor Earth stewardship. When I think of paradise, I never think about
acres and acres of mowed monochromatic grass. Imagine a garden that each generation in a
family can build on for the next and the quality of life and land value for
each generation is improved.

When I started gardening, I did it the way we were all taught. I tilled, planted
annuals in a row using crop rotation, hoed, watered a lot, fertilized, sprayed
for bugs, weeded and started over the next year. When we started out as organic gardeners none
of that changed. Then I started learning about permaculture and
was hooked. Permaculture isn’t a new way of gardening,
it’s the oldest way.

Once
their setup, permaculture gardens are low maintenance and produce high
yields. You build on your work every
year.

o
Plants
grown this way have provided for people
for thousands of years w/ less input than what people do today.

o
They
can provide shade, wind blocks, water storage, food and medicine.

o
Our
food forest and gardens are just in the beginning stage. We hope in 5 years we’ll have a good amount
of produce and materials with much less work than in a traditional garden.

o
In
Just two seasons, already there has been so much improvement over our
traditional gardening ways and we were able to harvest the first year.

·
Permaculture is a word used to describe design principles
in permanent agriculture.

o
It’s
a system based on observing and imitating nature. A way of looking at the whole system 3 dimensionally from the
tallest tree to the deepest rooted plants.
Nature doesn’t till, but it grows a garden every year. You look at how the
landscape flows, where the wind blows, what is already growing and where. You reduce your need for watering, weeding
and fertilizing. You learn to stack functions, maximize space, condition
soil and store water. Our goal is to have minimal garden work
in a few years, especially in our old age.
Mainly just cutting or mowing in the winter and adding that to the
gardens every year as mulch along with pruning and saving seed.

o
Gardens
can be designed using the same
principles that nature uses by creating plant communities that are
interconnected and benefit each other.

·
I
can’t get into all the basic concepts
today

o
I
have Handout (at end of this blog post) with information
on classes, books, links and wonderful online videos.

o
Last
2 years we’ve transitioning to permculture based system and today I want to share
about what we’ve been doing – what
has worked and what hasn’t.

I now think of myself as a soil farmer. If the life
in the soil is happy, the plants will be healthy. 1 tsp of good soil can contain a billion
bacteria, a million fungi & 10,000 amoebe.
It’s full of life. For a great
garden, taking care of these microbes is the most important job. They shuttle
nutrients around and break down matter that plants can’t digest on their
own. They are crucial to a
self-sustaining system. These
organisms can furnish almost all the fertilizer plants need, they keep the soil
light and fluffy and help the soil store water.
Using products like herbicides
and pesticides kill your microbes and leave you having to add fertility.

o
One
of the reasons we didn’t want to till
is because it actually compacts soil and kills the top layer of microbes and earth
worms. It does release a flood of
nutrients for temporary fast crop growth, but that’s only for the short
term. You release more nitrogen and carbon than you can use at one time, and it
washes away because the soil is unprotected from tilling. Fertility then has to be continually added
and crops rotated. Tilling ruins the soil structure and increases the chance of
erosion. So instead, we tried different
ways of creating an area to plant.

The
first things we did was create no-till or
lasagna beds. It’s
called Lasagna gardening because you add materials in layers like in lasagna.

o
This
picture shows what it looked like immediately after we built it. This is just the first small patch and I keep
adding to it. You’ll see pictures later
of how it’s progressed.

o
First
I mowed the area and then laid down non-colored cardboard or newspaper and if you have it put compost on top of
that and then I covered that with a thick
layer of straw – NOT HAY. Some
people wet this down, but I never have. Don’t
fluff the straw at this stage, lay it on thick in flakes. Then
add other things you have as you have it like cooled wood ash, grass clippings,
leaves or sawdust – get creative. There is a book called lasagna gardening on
my handout that explains how to do it properly, but I used what I had.

After 7 months

o In about 7 months there was a dry top layer of
straw, but when I pulled that back, there was dark crumbly, moist humus.
The heavy mulch reduces the need to water and helps suppress the
unwanted plants. Permaculture isn’t
fast, but you are building on something every year.

o
We’re
planting as many perennials as we
can for a permanent garden that won’t need much watering and some annuals are
stuck in here and there. Especially those that re-seed easily. Perennials are plants that last at least 3
seasons, but some last much longer than that.

o
When
planting seeds, make a hole in the straw,
put a little compost if you like and put in the seed. Don’t pull the straw back over it until the
seed germinates so you can watch it and keep it watered till it does. For a root
crop, pull the straw back and just put the root down in the light fluffy
new soil under the straw. I planted
Jerusalem artichokes with just my hands and later harvested the same way.

o
After
the seed is a plant, it’s a lot easier to mulch
around them with cut grass that has turned brown, than it is with straw. I don’t put green grass at the base of plants
in the summer because it’s hot. I put it
in the pathways to dry and brown some
and then it’s handy and is the most pleasant thing to add to the base of
plants. It’s easier to shape around the
plant and our straw has some prickly vines that I don’t like to touch. When you
are mulching around the base of plants, put the mulch on fluffier to let
more moisture through.

o
Otherwise
add fresh cut grass to compost piles
and to the tops of new beds you are building.

o
There’s
not much weeding in the no till bed. Grass pulls up very easily. But most plants that grow there, even those
traditionally considered weeds, have a benefit.
The first year there were almost no unintended plants, but I didn’t heavily
add mulch this winter and I’m glad for it.
This season there have been a lot of great volunteer plants that
probably wouldn’t have come up if I had.

o
But
you should keep adding to your no till
bed every year because the straw will break down.

o
To
imitate nature, you build light fluffy
soil from the top through plant matter and from underground by deeply
rooted plants that die and compost. Think of
cover crops and weeds as humus
builders.

o
The
most active growing parts of a plant
are the root hairs, sometimes only living a few hours and this decaying
organic
matter builds humus deep in the soil continually. Some plants send
roots 10-15 feet deep. On plants I truly want to limit, I cut them
at the base right before they go to seed and leave the cuttings in place
or put
them on the pathway. That way I benefit
from the root decay.

o
The
only plants I pull from the root are
vines, anything that will hurt to the touch or grass.

o
There
are all sorts of cover crops that
are annual or perennial. In the book
Gaia’s garden that I brought with me there is a chart listing different plants
you can use and you’re welcome to look at it afterwards.

o
If
you plant a variety of cover crops,
the soil life will be more diverse. The
more diverse the soil life, the healthier the soil. Just
balance the nitrogen fixers with non-legumes like annual ryegrass. The organisms in the soil use a lot more
carbon than nitrogen - so you don’t want just legumes.

o
Nitrogen fixing plants extract nitrogen from the air and
change it to a form other plants can use.
Some people think you have to till these plants under for them to
work. But that’s not true. Some common nitrogen fixers are peas, beans
or clover. It’s been found that clover
can feed nitrogen to the surrounding plants through their roots. We’re also growing other perennial nitrogen
fixers too like false indigo, buffalo
berry, and sweet fern. I couldn’t
live without sweet fern because I get poison ivy all summer.

o
Some
plants
can punch through and improve hard
compact sub-soil below the surface like rapeseed, mustard, mullein, and
burdock. You can even grow daikon radish
and leave it in the ground to compost.
Some plants bring minerals to the
surface like chicory and buckwheat.

o
If
you are using really old straw or
hay, watch for white powder in the
air, it probably isn’t good to breathe that in.
Be upwind of it and I try to use the oldest of the spoiled hay after a
rain and it’s slightly wet. Seems to
keep the powder down. It’s better to use
Straw than hay because hay has seed that you don’t want in your garden. But if the hay is really old, it’s probably
OK.

o
I
do prefer to cut pathways around the
property to harvest grass for mulch instead of buying straw and we’re
transitioning to buying less and less straw now that many of the gardens are
setup.

o
In
the fall and winter just cut more grass
and dead wildflowers and keep adding it (or straw) to your gardens. During the summer we cut pathways, during the
fall and winter I make a once over sweep of the pasture to take out baby trees
that we don’t want. This also helps wild
flowers to germinate more easily in the spring.

Here are some shots
of the garden the first year. This is the pumpkin that ate the garden.
The garden is surrounded by wild and planted perennial flowers. Some
of the produce from the garden below that.

o
In
an area of the garden where clover volunteered, I did like the famous Japanese
farmer Masanobu Fukuoka and had a clover
garden. He’s famous for not plowing
his fields, using no agricultural chemicals or prepared fertilizers, not
flooding his rice fields and his yields equaled or surpassed the most
productive farms in Japan. The clover plants are a living mulch and to
plant in it, just open a hole within the clover. All the greenery suppresses weeds, holds
moisture, blossoms attract beneficial insects, their nitrogen fixing boosts
growth for plants near it and it can be used for medicine.

o
At
the end of the season, I cut, not pull
the old tomato stems and lay on the side of
the garden to compost along with the Jerusalem artichoke stems and use for a snake
house because they will help keep mice out of the garden.

o
Some
plants that people consider weeds accumulate
nutrients from underground and
deposit in on top of the soil through leave litter. Plants like Yarrow, purslane, lamb’s
quarters, chicory, dandelion, plantain, and sunflowers. I leave all of these as they show up in the
garden. They also help attract
beneficial insects and yarrow may speed up the growth of some plants from
metabolites it releases into the soil.

o
We don’t usually plant the same types of plants together or all alone like you do in
a typical monoculture planting. As much
as possible, plants get all mixed up just like in nature and that’s called
polyculture. One of the benefits to
keeping alike plants spaced apart is It reduces bug problems since bugs can’t
simply walk from their favorite plant to another easily in a bug buffet. There are other benefits as well and you can
learn more by reading some good permaculture books.

·
There
are many ways of making a no-till bed. Another way by laying down a
sheet of black plastic for a while
until the grass underneath was dead. An
added benefit is that it fluffed the soil, especially if you do it in
the fall
and winter because of frost heave.
This made planting so easy. In
one bed I scratched the surface to broadcast seed and didn’t use much
mulch. In this bed I planted mostly perennial
flowers like sweet William, butterfly weed and coreopsis. Among them, I
planted watermelons. Wildflowers and perennial planted flowers
grew together and are beautiful, the watermelons grew very well. With
zero effort, the flowers are all coming
back this year.

o
When
you are done making the bed, get the plastic out of the sun as soon as possible
and store to use later. It’ll
deteriorate quickly in the sun. In
another bed I made with black plastic like this, I laid down thick flakes of
straw like in the no-till bed.

·
When
we first moved here, our property had a ton of debris piled up and an excessive
amount of rose bushes, so we did have a few burn piles. Nature
hates exposed soil, so after burning, pioneer plants move in quickly to
take care of it and you can plant a cover crop here also. This created
a space that was also very easy to plant. Peas planted here were twice as big as peas
planted elsewhere and it was very easy to push the pea into the ground.

o
So Pioneer plants quickly cover exposed soil, and are usually
plants that create fertility. Deep tap
root plants also move in like mullein or burdock will break through hardpan
soil. Their leaves create a lot of
nutrient rich plant material that composts on the surface. The plantain, dandelion, chicory, clover and
sorrel type plants keep the soil covered and bring nutrients to the surface
also. Left alone they will improve the
soil and make way for other plants. I have entire raised beds that I’ve left to
clover and other weeds because the soil is so dense and will try them again
next year.

o
Succession is nature’s way of taking bare earth
to forest. First short annual pioneer
weeds come in, cover the soil and prepare the way for tall perennials, then in
a few years perennial shubs and under the right conditions, the shrubs prepare
the earth for a young forest. You can
use this to your benefit and create a woodland landscape with sunny openings
with a blend of trees, shrubs, and plants requiring little input from you.

·
My
first intro to permaculture was a video on Food Forests also called Forest Gardening - it has been my passion ever since. I knew about the no-till and no weeding
methods, but I didn’t really find out about permaculture until I discovered
this video which led to some permaculture books. For
Thousands of years people learned to work with the natural systems in a way
that met their needs for food, water, medicine, fiber and building
materials. Food forests have been found
that are still productive today that are between 2 – 3,000 years old.

o
A
forest recycles its nutrients and
they’ve found that they typically only lose 2% of minerals to run off each
year. Traditionally tilled and heavily
fertilized fields lose 25 – 60% of its minerals each year through run off.

o
Permaculture
uses each layer of a forest to help
other plants, create protection, fertilize naturally, provide food and build up
soil. Each layer is important.

o
In
our woods we already had persimmons, hazelnuts, oaks, and then closer to the
open spaces and the edge a variety of shrubs like sumac, berries, herbs and
wildflowers. Those existing trees that can be used for food or medicine will get more
space if it needs it and gardens created around it of shade loving perennials
and support plants.

o
Also
we’ve been planting many more fruit and
nut trees in the woods. Along the
edge we have planted more berries, medicinal herbs and other perennial plants that
are either for food or are nitrogen fixing or both.

·
We’ve
started a new food forest in an open
grove that’s surrounded by a perimeter of tall oaks and that has been planted
with fruit trees.

o
Expanding out from each tree base are
no-till beds created
with cardboard or natural fiber cloth or straw.
They will be continually expanded till they are large enough to meet
each other with pathways winding through.

o
In
the smaller planted areas, to keep chickens from scratching the straw away, I cover it with easy to carry rocks slightly
spaced apart. Rocks also are a mulch
and condense and drip morning dew to the soil under them. It doesn’t help the tree much, but will help
other support plants planted under the tree.
It’s easy to move the rocks and add new mulch as you need it.

o
Perennial support plants are being planted around the
trees. Beneficial plants like Comfrey will be planted for the “chop & drop” method to build
fertile soil. It’s a nutrient accumulator
and produces a lot of plant material.
It’s strong tap roots break through clay and hard soil. It can also be used medicinally and attracts
beneficial insects. Along with Jerusalem
artichoke, this is also a fortress plant that will keep down the grass and other plants from
moving in.

o
Different
trees have what are called guilds. Those are plant and tree communities which
are mutually beneficial. In a guild
you’ll have plants for food, herbs, insect and bird attraction, soil building,
fortress plants and sometimes nurse plants that take care of the baby trees
till they are more mature.

o In an apple tree guild could be Comfrey, legumes, globe artichokes, nasturtium,
dill, fennel. At
the drip line of the apple tree; bulbs like daffodils can be planted to suppress
grass and deter dear from eating your apples. Just outside of the daffodil
circle, comfrey plants will attract bees and other beneficial insects. The
artichokes planted with the comfrey will provide soil building mulch for the
apple tree and the other members of the guild.

·
We
are transitioning from mostly annuals to
mostly perennials or plants that easily self-seed. This will stop the work of focusing on
starts every year and greatly reduce the need for water and fertilizer.

o
There
are annuals that re-seed easily like
arugula, chard, lettuce and kale.

o
Picking
plants that are multifunctional is called stacking
functions. A medicinal herb can also
be a nutrient accumulator, fertilizer and reduce weeds (like comfrey or mullein). Or edible plants that provide shade to the
house.

·
The
prior owners left behind piles and piles of old decaying wood. We’ve been stacking that wood into what is
called hugelkultur beds. It’s an ancient form of sheet mulching using wood waste to build soil fertility, improve
drainage and for moisture retention.
I started by killing the grass using cardboard and straw. On top of that I lay the wood down in a wide
bed and then start layering with bad or good soil, rotting straw, animal
manure, cooled wood ash and more decaying wood.
The beds can be several feet high and are covered in dirt. Or create a compost pile on it and use the
bed the next year. The rotting logs will
retain moisture feeding it to your plants and as the wood decomposes it changes
even the most infertile soil into fertile.

·
The
newest garden beds I’m creating by composting
in place. When the compost pile is
ready, it then becomes a garden bed and another is started usually right next
to it. I steal a little compost for
starting seeds and then plant in it.
Moving compost kills worms and much of the good stuff is washed into the
soil below, so composting in place makes sense.
You could even do it with raised beds.

·
We
started just mowing the areas we need
for pathways and work space. The
grass is harvested and used on the no-till beds or in the compost pile. The first year all around the garden grew so
many beneficial plants and insect traps.
In an area near where we live grew a huge patch of a beautiful purple
flower called self-heal that I harvested for herbal products, and butterfly
weed and many other wonderful flowers grew.

o
There
were no baby trees growing in the area so I didn’t mow it again last
fall. This year, no self heal is growing there and it is now only
growing on the
pathways that were mowed. So it was a
learning experience and through observation I learned that if I want
those
particular plants to continue to grow, I need to mow down the tall stuff
in the
fall.

o
In
the areas around the garden that weren’t
mowed in the spring, there was a sea of beneficial plants that grew
which
I’ll talk about later. But one I discovered was Gaura Biennis and though
it was
covered in Japanese Beetles, there were none in the garden. It’s a nice
tall plant that gets covered in
little white and pink blooms. When it
first started growing, I had no idea what it was but left it. It took a
while to identify it. I’m so glad I didn’t mow around the garden,
or those Japanese beetles would have been eating our food.

·
Some
of our planned permaculture projects involve water storage, though No-till and heavily mulched beds require much
less watering. Typical home landscapes
consume more water, fertilizer and pesticides than industrial farms, so it’s something everyone can do.

o
We
catch rain water from the roofs of
different outbuildings and use for the garden.

o
But
the cheapest way to store water is in
the soil. Soil w/ humus and organic
matter acts like a sponge and can hold several times its weight in water. Soil with just 2% organic matter can hold 75%
more water than poor soil. So Again,
soil building is the most important part.
Some people that live in a residential area don’t know this, but many
times the builders strip off and sell the top soil when building the homes. To start from scratch in that case, some
people have truckloads of compost from yard waste programs and peat moss
brought in.

o
You
can make swales and contours, even
minimal ones and the water is stored in a lens in the earth below the
swale. Good soil can hold a lake
underground that feeds the plants from below.
Place plants with their water needs in mind.

o
We’re
going to start routing our gray-water
from the house into a marsh with
filtering plants and overflow into a pond next to the garden. Around the pond will be water loving
perennials. You can even run a marsh
under gravel if you’re worried about mosquito larvae. In
several good permaculture books, you can
read about creating a habitat for waterfowl, putting in the correct plants like
cat-tail (which you can eat) and vegetation density which will help eliminate
mosquito problems.

o
Even
if you don’t have a gray-water system, water can easily be routed from the washing machine into a gravel bed near
a tree. Do a little research on what you
can put down your drain when using gray water.
You don’t want things like bleach
or mineral oil going to the base of your trees. Definitely avoid detergents that have softening agents because those are
usually made of salts that build up in the soil over time.

·
A
permaculture system has a lot of ways to deal with pests and disease. But 90% of the bugs you see in the garden are
beneficial or harmless. I bought a bug
identification book and was surprised how many we had that were the good
guys. A garden should support predator
bugs and pollinators.

o
I
create obstacle courses in the
garden. Nature doesn’t have solitary
plants of the same height, type and root depth creating a bug superhighway
where they can easily travel from their favorite plant to favorite plant. By mixing up the planting, no two plants that
are the same will touch and it creates a bit of an obstacle course for certain
bugs. I also have an obstacle course of very
tall grass between the two gardens plots.
Some permaculturist I know say if
you are going to plant a tomato for example, then 75% of the rest of the plants
in the bed should not be a tomato. I’m
not quite there yet.

o
Around
the garden in the un-mowed areas, Beneficial
insect attractors like Queen Anne’s
lace, Butterfly weed, clover, Dandelion, cinquefoil, yarrow, and
bergamot
grew. Even though our garden is still in
the very early stages of permaculture design and is really lacking, I
wasn’t being wiped out by squash bugs like
others I knew. I didn’t see any squash
bugs till the very end of the season when all the pumpkins were
finishing up
and it didn’t affect the harvest. We had a few horn worms on the
tomatoes, but
not so many we couldn’t pick off and eventually I saw a hornworm with
the white
larvae of a wasp that kills them. I
talked a little about how Guara Biennis
attracted ALL of the Japanese beetles and so did the wild multiflora
roses which also grow near the garden. There were no Japanese beetles
in the garden
only a few feet away.

·
Permaculturists
design for maximum use of space. Wide beds reduce the number of paths giving
you more area to plant. Planting in a
triangle pattern and using keyhole beds maximizes space also.

o
For
example, to get 50 square feet of planting in a typical garden layout with
single rows of plants requires 40 square feet of pathways. Changing to wide double reach beds can cut
that to 10 square feet of pathways and using a keyhole bed can cut it to 6
square feet of pathways. A double
reach bed is one where you can only reach to the center of the bed from
either side.

o
A keyhole bed is shaped like a U and maximizes space. We have just started building keyhole beds
this year. You can combine several of
them together pointing the central path south to create interesting shapes in a
yard.

o
Another
cool space saving design is called the
spiral. You can create a tall cone
shaped bed for different climate types depending on the location. Plant
in a spiral up the cone. Plants that like hot and dry would be on the
top and south side. Plants that like it
shady and moist would be on the bottom on the North side. It’s a great
idea for an herb garden near the
kitchen. You can put Rosemary, dill,
oregano and thyme towards the top and cilantro, parsley and chives
towards the
bottom.

·
There
are so many types of perennial plants
to grow for different garden types and locations and whole books written about
it.

o
I’m
learning I do have to work a little harder getting
some perennials to start from seed and had a large number not germinate
this year. Many need to be cold
stratified in the fridge or the seed needs to be scratched – for many I
didn’t
do either to see how it would go. It
didn’t for a lot. Many seed packets gave instructions to plant directly
and they aren't germinating either. More research needs to be done on
each new seed in the future.

o
Some
new perennials we are trying this year are focused on food and improving the
soil.

§ Cucumberberry vine which can grow in
any soil and shade creates edible cucumber type fruit.

§ Groundcherry grows in worn out soil,
has a deep taproot, grows in sun or shade and very tall. They say you can use the fruit like a
tomato.

§ Blue False Indigo as a nitrogen
fixer, medicine and dye. It can take any
moisture level as long as well drained, can be mowed in the fall and can take
full sun to partial shade. (eyewash,
sore tooth, immune system, ulcers).

§ Bundleflower and Red Autumnberry as a
nitrogen fixer and for fruit.

§ Buffaloberry is a drought tolerant
tall shrub that makes edible fruit and is a nitrogen fixer.

§ Wild Ginger and leeks which grow well
in the shade under trees.

§ A Korean Nut pine which makes ¾” pine
nuts and you can start harvesting in 5 years.
The tree can get to 80 feet tall!

Promoting the use of local, abundant plants for food, health and beauty.

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